A 21st century person’s guide to wordsmithery

Google

You know that noise you get in cartoons when someone tells a really terrible joke and the obligatory tumbleweed rolls lazily past as the wind whistles all around? That’s what it sounds like when you log into Google+.

Google has brought us many brilliant and useful things – who, after all, searches for ANYTHING online and doesn’t use the Google search engine? Probably just people who work at Microsoft and are made to use Bing on pain of having red-hot pokers shoved in unpleasant places if they so much as look like they’re going to do a Google search. (Ed: *runs a Google search* “Do Amazon ship red-hot pokers that are compatible with Bill Gates?…”)

So we all love the Google search engine, right?

But Google+ is without doubt the worst social network of them all – there, we’ve said it and it’s out in the room! Phew, I bet you all feel better now, right? You thought it was only you, didn’t you? Even that little ‘+’ at the end is annoying, sitting there looking all smug and winking at you with its one little cross eye, twitching nervously at it contemplates whether to bollocks up your search optimisation.

Do:

Post your blog links and content here. Let’s face it, there’s only one reason to be on Google+ and that’s because posting your content and links on Google+ will help the search engine optimisation (SEO) of your web pages, blogs and digital marketing.

Post regularly. Because it’s all part of the one big Google family, if you do a quick status update on Google+, it’s more likely that your link will come higher up the search rankings – and that’s the pinnacle of your content dreams after all, right?

Use hashtags (# these annoying little finnicky buggers) to flag up your content – unlike Facebook, where using a hashtag marks you out as a prize tool, in Google+ tagging your posts may actually help you find the right audience for your latest treatise on why Fraggle Rock should be recommissioned (Ed: Good idea. Get on it, ITV!)

Don’t:

Try using Google+ as a social place to hang out, shoot the breeze and post the usual kind of chatty status updates. As a social networking site, it has all the ambience and attraction of a Wetherspoons boozer at 3pm on a Tuesday – in other words, it’s almost empty, and the people you DO meet will definitely not be your first choice of companion, drinking or otherwise.

Loiter once you’ve posted that update. Write it, stick in your hashtags and publish it: then get the HELL out of there! Stay around any longer and you may well be digitised and pulled into the Google mainframe to spend a Tron-like existence trapped for eternity in the HTML code of Chrome. Apply the Primark shopping approach: go in, get what you need, get out and hope no-one has spotted you paying £1.50 for your undercrackers.

Add anyone you actually know to the ‘Circles’ in Google+. This is Google’s way of grouping people together by friendship/work/customer type, and it’s all a bit too ‘sorting people and putting them in a box’ for our liking. Avoid at all costs, and talk to your real friends on Twitter or Facebook… or Snapchat if youse is like well young, innit.